Bite the Bullet

A good cast, some nice photography and an interesting story about a 700-mile horse race make "Bite The Bullet" kind of underrated western. You don't hear it mentioned much in "Favorite Westerns" lists.

The only drawbacks for me were a little too much language and that grundgy-70s feel to it that movies in that decade had to them, even in westerns. Having grown up with "Shane," and a bunch of westerns on TV, I still wasn't quite used to what I heard here when this came out 30 years ago. Nowadays, this is mild stuff.

This is a fairly long film at 131 minutes but it moves fast. Gene Hackman plays the tough-but-humane hero. The rest of the contestants in this race are all interesting, too. Each is given a little profile of themselves and include Candice Bergen, James Coburn, Jan-Michael Vincent, Ben Johnson and Ian Bannen.

In addition, there are some memorable scenes such as a horse literally dropping dead; a man poisoned, a woman with a "different agenda" an old man hanging on and a bad-turned-good kid. It's a nice mixture.